The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart released a column on Wednesday suggesting the only reason Tucker Carlson is anti-war is because he’s a “bigot” who believes Iraqis and Afghans are “too barbaric to subjugate.”

In the Trump era, some on the anti-interventionist left have developed a tolerance for, even a grudging appreciation of, Tucker Carlson. The reason: He’s a caustic critic of hawkish foreign policy. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, the historian Stephen F. Cohen, and the author Max Blumenthal–all of whom agree with Carlson that the Trump-Russia scandal is fueling a new cold war–regularly appear on his show. After Carlson last month savaged William Kristol and Max Boot as “professional war peddlers,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna–one of the most creative and influential doves in Congress–praised Carlson on Twitter for offering “a devastating critique [of] interventionism” that shows “there is an emerging, left right coalition of common sense for a foreign policy of restraint.”

To be sure, the progressives who appreciate Carlson’s anti-interventionism do not appreciate his racism–his endless demonization of black and brown immigrants, who he claims are making America “dirtier,” or his recycling of white-nationalist conspiracy theories about the oppression of white farmers in South Africa. Lefties such as Greenwald distinguish between Carlson’s foreign-policy views, which they consider a useful antidote to the hawkishness prevalent in both parties, and his racial views, which they abhor.

But what if they are inextricably intertwined? That’s the message of the decade-old, previously unheard recordings of Carlson that Media Matters released on Monday. They expose the core reason that he evolved from hawk to dove: He decided Iraqis and Afghans were too barbaric to be worth conquering.